A TV screen shows a news report of Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked top-secret documents about sweeping U.S. surveillance programs, at a shopping mall in Hong Kong Sunday.

MOSCOW — Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor wanted by the United States for revealing highly classified surveillance programs, flew to Russia on Sunday and planned to head to Ecuador to seek asylum, the South American country’s foreign minister and the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said.

Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his government has received a request for asylum from Snowden. WikiLeaks, which is giving Snowden legal assistance, said his asylum request would be formally processed once he arrived in Ecuador, the same country that has already been sheltering the anti-secrecy group’s founder Julian Assange in its London embassy.

Snowden arrived in Moscow on an Aeroflot flight shortly after 5 p.m. Sunday after being allowed to leave Hong Kong, where he had been in hiding for several weeks after he revealed information on the highly classified spy programs.

Snowden was spending the night in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and was booked on an Aeroflot flight to Cuba today, the Russian news agencies ITAR-Tass and Interfax reported, citing unnamed airline officials. Aeroflot has no direct flights from Moscow to Quito, Ecuador; travelers would have to make connections in Paris, Rome or Washington, which could be problematic for Snowden.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, the WikiLeaks spokesman, told Britain’s Sky News that Snowden would be meeting with diplomats from Ecuador in Moscow. WikiLeaks said he was being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from the group.

The car of Ecuador’s ambassador to Russia was parked outside the airport in the evening.

Assange, who has spent a year inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning about sex crime allegations, told the Sydney Morning Herald that WikiLeaks is in a position to help because it has expertise in international asylum and extradition law.

A U.S. official in Washington said Snowden’s passport was annulled before he left Hong Kong, which could complicate but not thwart his travel plans. The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for lack of authorization to discuss the matter, said that if a senior official in a country or airline ordered it, a country could overlook the withdrawn passport.

While Patino did not say if the asylum request would be accepted, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has shown repeated willingness to irk the U.S. government and he has emerged as one of the leaders of Latin America’s leftist bloc, along with Fidel and Raul Castro of Cuba and Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez.

Both the United States and Britain protested his decision to grant asylum to Assange.

Critics have suggested that asylum for Assange might be aimed partly at blunting international criticism of Correa’s own tough stance on critics and new restrictions imposed on the news media.

The White House said President Barack Obama has been briefed on Sunday’s developments by his national security advisers.

Snowden’s departure came a day after the United States made a formal request for his extradition and gave a pointed warning to Hong Kong against delaying the process of returning him to face trial in America.

The Department of Justice said only that it would “continue to discuss this matter with Hong Kong and pursue relevant law enforcement cooperation with other countries where Mr. Snowden may be attempting to travel.”

The Hong Kong government said in a statement that Snowden left “on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel.”

It acknowledged the U.S. extradition request, but said U.S. documentation did not “fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.” It said additional information was requested from Washington, but since the Hong Kong government “has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr. Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.”